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An issue I have with this essay is that it assumes that it's the absence of central planning which gives rise to unlivable and automobile dominated cities. But
by derriz 5y ago
An issue I have with this essay is that it assumes that it's the absence of central planning which gives rise to unlivable and automobile dominated cities.
But if you look at old photos of European or American cities before the rise of the internal combustion engine, you typically see a completely unplanned street usage: bicycles, pedestrians, horse drawn vehicles, kids running amok, etc. all sharing the space in seeming anarchy.
It required massive central planning to replace this shared space with segregated streets with 90% of the space dedicated solely to motorised traffic. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to allow central planners to run huge new traffic arteries through the centers of cities. Land was "opened up" for suburban development through central planning and massive centrally planned road and motorway building.
I guess my point is that associating "central planning" with liveable patterns of development does not seem reasonable to me. Central planning can and has been used for good and for bad - it was used to destroy urban environments in favour of motorised vehicles in some places, just as it's been used to promote much more liveable development patterns in places like the Netherlands.
- nickff 5y ago"Zoned in the USA" describes the history of zoning in Canada and the USA, which accords with your view. James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" includes the example of razing neighborhoods (in Paris) as you describe.
- sudosysgen 5y agoYou're confusing design, planning, and central planning. Traffic arteries are not the result of central economic planning. They are the result of the free market dumping the externalities of cars. At that point you have two choices. Either you ban the car, and interfere in the free market and "pick winners and losers", something Hayek wouldn't like, or you adapt the infrastructure to what people are asking for in order to reduce traffic fatalities and other externalities of car ownership. Central planning would be saying - no, cars aren't working at scale, we will limit the production of cars. In this case the government didn't do central planning. It didn't pick winners and losers. It went with what the free market decided.
- da_big_ghey 5y agoGovernment overstepped to create large roads for cars, which create a problem of induced demand. Private can not use eminent domain and sieze property for roads.
- sudosysgen 5y agoBefore they did people just die crushed by cars. Yes there was induced demand but it was already too late before then
- Proven 5y ago> Traffic arteries are not the result of central economic planning. They are the result of the free market dumping the externalities of cars. Complete nonsense. Where are those cities with privately planned, designed and owned roads you talk about?
- drak0n1c 5y agoRobert Moses, a planner, demolished and fractured thriving neighborhoods to build massive highways in New York City in his quest to see cars working at scale. Architects and planners of the time like Moses and Le Corbusier did not pay close attention to markets, they were focused on utopic designs and unrealistic beliefs of what humans would achieve in radically new spaces. That is why we have legacy highways and sprawling public housing projects.